Dorie's Perfect Party Cake - DB March 2008

Well, this is my first Daring Bakers challenge. And yes, I did leave it to the last minute, but I've been busy with other things.



I didn't make the finals on Art You Eat either, but thanks to all other participants, I have plenty of new ideas that'll keep me going for a while. That was great and I'd like to try more of that.

But back to the cake and the Daring Bakers challenge. It certainly was a challenge for me - the cake batter is different to what I've done before and I'd never made butter cream before either. Also I haven't seen such a thing as cake flour in the UK, so I used plain flour and used Ulrike's metric conversion as a basis.

Ingredients

Cake

300 g plain flour
1 tbsp baking powder
0.5 tsp salt
300 ml full fat milk
4 large egg whites at room temperature
300 g granulated sugar
2 tsp grated lemon zest
115 g unsalted butter at room temperature
0.5 tsp lemon extract

Butter cream

200 g granulated sugar
4 large egg whites at room temperature
60 ml lemon juice
1.25 tsp liquid vanilla extract

Finishing

120 g raspberry preserve
1 dl dessicated coconut
1 dl coconut flakes
200 g fresh raspberries
1 tsp lemon zest

Method

1. Sift flour, baking powder and salt together in a bowl.
2. In a second bowl, whisk together the milk and egg whites enough to mix them together.
3. In a third large bowl, rub the sugar and lemon zest together. The sugar becomes moist and wonderfully fragrant.
4. Add the butter to the sugar, a bit at a time and whisk it in with an electric whisk. There may be need to get your fingers dirty here too, my whisk wasn't very good at the start.
5. Add the extract, then a third of the dry ingredients, whisking all the time.
   
6. Then add half of the milk-egg white mixture, then another third of the dry ingredients.
7. Finish with the last half of the milk-egg white mixture and the last of the dry ingredients and continue to whisk until the batter is smooth.
8. Divide between two cake tins - 22.5 cm/9" diameter and bake in a pre-heated oven at 180 degrees C (gas mark 4). The sponges should take about 30 - 35 minutes. Leave to cool when ready.
9. For the butter cream, make Swiss meringue with the sugar and egg whites, by whisking them together over a bain-marie until it's nice, firm and glossy.
10. Remove from the heat and continue whisking until the meringue cools down. Then add the butter to it, a bit at a time, still whisking, until it's completely incorporated. Then continue whisking for about 10 minutes until the butter cream is smooth and thick.
11. Add the lemon juice gradually and finally the vanilla extract.
12. Slice the cake sponges so you have 4 cake layers. Spread a thin layer of raspberry jam and a thin-ish layer of butter cream between each sponge layer, leaving about a quarter of the butter cream for decoration.
    
13. Cover the assembled cake with the butter cream and decorate with the coconut, lemon zest and fresh raspberries.

On the whole, this was a very tasty cake, but with the butter cream it felt a bit rich. Also making it took most of yesterday, there are many turns to do for the butter cream and I'm not sure the 10 minutes of whisking made any difference.

And it didn't help that I didn't have 9" cake tins. I have one 7.5" and one 13" and I wasn't sure if I should use either of them. And because I didn't want to buy new cake tins, I bought cake liners at the right size. Unfortunately they didn't stay in shape too well and I ended up with two oval cake sponges and so my original design had to be drastically altered.





This was interesting, but I'm not sure it was worth all the effort it took. I'd never made sponge cake with egg whites only and also butter cream was a new thing too. Also I really liked rubbing the sugar and lemon zest together, the smell was so wonderful, and I have three new things I've learned from this challenge.